A Digital Ecommerce Transformation – A Little More Background Before We Get Started – Part III

The TWLER.com (The Worlds Largest Electronics Retailer) architecture team started with the chief architect and five additional people, myself for high scale Java applications and NoSQL, a TWLER consultant/architect that had lived through the entire life of TWLER.com and recently converted to an employee, a second TWLER employee architect specializing in APIs and Product catalogs, a cloud infrastructure architect, and another systems thinking high scale Java architect. With a six person team, we tasked ourselves with converting TWLER.com from its massive monolithic state to a new not yet known state. What we decided early, or was decided for us, was that we were going to evolve out of the current state to a future state. It was decided for us by two constraints, not enough capital to build a new system separately and run the current system, and the stipulation that business must continue unaffected by our efforts. At this time revenue was around $1.5 billion.

There were multiple projects that we started that first year: infrastructure automation of a modern build infrastructure deployed in a cloud, cloud based outage site, distributed product catalog and QA automation. There was one more task assigned to me as exploratory which was to look into the ATG Ant build and see if there was any way of automating it with a dependency management framework.

The selection of these projects was built around the strategy to establish a modern engineering infrastructure that we could then leverage with all our future work. Having a robust Continuous Integration environment, universally available Git and SVN version control systems, artifact repository, wiki, task management and user authentication system would allow us to move quickly in the future. The distributed product catalog was built off the theory that to exit ATG, the basis of that plan required a new distributed product catalog outside of the ATG system. QA automation was the final card needed to move past six week manual release testing windows so that we could run thousands of regression tests in hours and speed up the release process.

My main project was QA automation, which was a successful disaster. Successful in that we were able to automate many of the manual test cases using Selenium and JBehave, but that the UI was so inconsistently rendered that all fields had to be accessed directly with XPath, and even then the pages sometimes rendered differently causing the tests to fail. Additionally, we were unable to setup test data in a consistent manner causing tests to fail randomly when underlying data was changed or deleted. In reality it was still better than the manual tests, but we struggled to maintain even 80% test coverage for more than a few days.

The most interesting work for me was delving into the ANT build file for ATG. I had plenty of experience with ANT in its heyday in the late 90s and early 2000s. I thought I knew ANT pretty well, but when faced with the 20+ ANT files that made up the build of 14 separate ATG applications, I had met my match. In my spare time I started tracing through the ANT files, determining how variables were setup up and finding the main path through the files. I had to diagram out the actual workings of the files as there was multiple instances of recursion occurring within the build process. My goal was to figure out how to convert the build over to Maven, which I’m sure many of you hate, but bringing in dependency management and forcing a standard file system layout we felt were the most important considerations.

After a few weeks, it was my estimate that it would probably take a couple people 2-3 months to convert the ATG build from ANT to Maven, and that we could tackle it in smaller pieces by starting with the 13 builds that were not the main TWLER.com site. We shelved this idea for the time being, but when we did get back to it a year later, my estimate proved exceedingly optimistic.